The Science Tree Project

Along the history, many researchers have provided remarkable contributions
to science, not only advancing knowledge but also in terms of mentoring
new scientists. Currently, identifying and studying the formation of
researchers over the years is a challenging task as current repositories
of theses and dissertations are cataloged in a decentralized way through
many local digital libraries. In this project, we give a first step
towards building a large repository that records the academic genealogy of
researchers across fields and countries. We crawled data from the Lattes
Platform and developed a framework to extract academic genealogy trees
from this data, providing a series of analyses that describe the main
properties of the academic genealogy trees. Our effort identified
interesting findings related to the structure of academic formation, which
highlight the importance of cataloging academic genealogy trees. We hope
our initial framework will be the basis of a much larger crowdsourcing
system.